#who doesn't hunger for such things?

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

How about some meta about what Grima drinks? What do you think he prefers when it comes to ales and wines, how does he take his coffee, and so on? And does he like something to nosh on while he drinks (meats/cheeses/veggies with wines and ales, sweets with coffee, etc)?

Oh I do love a food history question! I’ve answered asks about alcohol preferences before and also food so for reference, links to my previous ramblings: here and here and here and here and here.

I. might like to talk about Grima & food a lot. Maybe.

Tl;dr: I don’t think Grima’s ever had coffee or “true” tea (i.e., tea from the tea plant). Granted, if it existed in Rohan Grima would have a coffee IV drip inserted into his arm because that man looks like the walking dead in terms of a clear need for sleep.

Much more likely, he would have been drinking herbal teas/infusions/tisanes (e.g., dandelion or nettle). For alcohol: he mostly drinks wine, because it’s a status symbol. But he prefers ale and mead. I don’t know how he feels about ciders—I can see him going in different directions on that.

I also ramble about what he’d be snacking on as well—sweets mostly, breads (he loves carbs, we all know that is a man who loves carbs), various cheeses and yoghurt/yoghurt adjacent things.

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As always, I wrote you all a novel.

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Some Preliminary Meanderings on Trade

So first, I don’t know that Rohan has coffee or tea? (When I refer to “tea” here I mean tea from the tea plant (Camellia sinensis, which is native to China) I’ll distinguish other teas by calling them herbal teas or infusions etc.)

It’s hard to parse food and trade customs in Middle Earth because Tolkien wasn’t thinking like a historian, he was thinking like a linguist and a literature professor. Therefore, things are a little wonky when you try and work them through from a regional economics perspective.

For example, we know hobbits have tea, but no one else is mentioned as having tea. When drinking happens in other places it’s almost always wine or ale or mead or some other alcoholic beverage.

We also know hobbits have tobacco, which is a North American import. Obviously Tolkien created lore around how they got tobacco, since he seemed to be trying to keep Middle Earth pretty pre-colonization of North and South America in some ways. So they wouldn’t have had access to foods like tomatoes, potatoes, certain squashes, avocado, bananas, pineapples [yes, for all my tomato & pineapple jokes Grima wouldn’t know what they are], corn, certain beans etc. Most of this food wasn’t imported from the newly colonized north, south, and central America and the Caribbean until the 16th century.

LOTR is, first and foremost, a fairy tale smashed with legends such as those found in Arthuriana (Frankish and English versions), Italian legends, and the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon mythos (think: Beowulf, various poetic Eddas etc.) This is why there are moments where things don’t quite work smoothly if you think about them long enough. (Hobbits are weirdly self-sufficient and technologically advanced yet we know they have regular contact with Bree who seems a hundred years behind them?)

The big, key thing is that Middle Earth, in the third age, is a fundamentally disconnected world. Even before Sauron’s return to Mordor, the human population across Gondor and Rohan and other areas has been decimated through war and diseases of the second age and early third age.

When we meet Rohan they’re a bit isolationist, aside from the strong connection to Gondor—how much of that is Grima, how much is Theoden, Thengel, Fengel, who knows. I can see Fengel starting the trend, Thengel and Theoden had strong pro-Gondor biases so would have repaired any fraught connections with that country, but I don’t see either really caring about anyone else. Rohan seems to have some strong xenophobic tendencies.

Grima, in his treason days, would have seen the benefit of an isolated, weak Rohan so would have kept it that way. If not made it worse.

Therefore, who is Rohan trading with? Gondor. Maaaaaaaaybe Laketown/Dale? But I personally see that as a stretch given the mass amount of pretty much desolate land between Laketown/Dale and Rohan. Also, it’s clear by Eomer’s reaction to Gimli that they’ve had no interactions with the Lonely Mountain. Like. Ever. If they had, Eomer would have known Gimli’s name and even if he’s the most truculent man Rohan’s ever produced, he knows how to do Prince Behaviour and would have acted accordingly.

Anyway, it's one thing to send a delegation or ambassador across such swaths of land on a specific mission, another to have merchants trekking that distance with no real support or safety network. They’d get robbed in a heartbeat.

Gondor has been on tense terms with pretty much all her neighbours, save Rohan, for a few generations at this point. Trade relations with Harad, Umber, and out east (Rhun etc.) are likely non-existent. And have been for a good while.

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What does this mean for coffee and tea?

Going on Tolkien’s structuring of the world, I presume coffee and tea came from Harad and out east of Rhun since those spaces broadly represent middle east/parts of Africa (e.g., some aspects of Umber was loosely based on Ethiopia) and The East as seen through the lens of an Englishman steeped in a racist, orientalist culture.

Now, we know that Harad and Rhun are both aligned with the dark lord (just coincidentally, not at all for racist reasons /sarcasm/), and have had a historically fraught relationship with Gondor (lot’s of attempted colonization by Gondor, wars, bad international relations), I’m assuming there’s not been trade between them for a good, long while.

So, if there is coffee or tea in Gondor it’s been smuggled in. Therefore, if there’s coffee or tea in Rohan it’s what’s been smuggled into Gondor and somehow managed to be sold on into Rohan for a whack, whack tonne of money.

Perspective: In 14th c England a pound of ginger cost the same as a sheep—and that is a more or less accessible product procured legally.

Could Grima afford coffee or tea? I honestly don’t know. If he could, it’d be like half a year or a whole year’s income. That’s even presuming he would have had an opportunity to procure it. If he did, it’d be a rarity and would have been sold on the down-low, because of the obvious implications of what it means to have access to it.

Post-war of the ring? Gondor throws her weight around, (re)colonizes some places, forces others into subjugation, and as a result trade networks are likely reopened—either willingly or by force. So, after the war I see coffee and tea becoming far more accessible in Gondor and therefore, more accessible in Rohan.

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I could see it being something people remember. Theoden’s father remembers his grandfather drinking coffee, that sort of thing.

Since I have Grima’s mother coming from the east as a quasi-refugee, she’d recall tea from childhood/young adulthood. It’s just they can’t get any, because of the war and the distance and lack of reliable trade network.

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What does this mean for our favourite snake man?

So, what would Grima be drinking aside from ale and mead and wine and imported liquor?

Water, of course. There’d be wells also possible access to spring water (depending on where they are). So that’s an option.

There’s also milk. The Anglo-Saxon and early Medieval Scandinavian foodscape did funky, fun thinks with lightly fermented milk products—and aside from turning it into cheese, skyr, and iterations of kefir, they’d also soured dairy run-offs to cure their meat over the winter as an alternative to salting.

The one really relevant to the ask is herbal teas/tisanes/infusions. These would be drunk in medicinal settings as well as for ritual/spiritual reasons. Some were also likely imbibed for the pleasure of it. The ones noted below are a mix of medicinal, ritual, and herbal teas that taste nice.

Some common herbal teas Grima might have access to include, but are not limited to: dandelion, rosehip, elderberry, mugwort (do drugs, commit treason), valerian (as a sedative), mint, yellow gentian, fennel, nettle, clover, pine, rosemary, sage, poppy (another sedative, but also used for other ailments), St. John’s wort, apple and berries, local mushrooms etc.

Some options he’d have easier access to once he is in the king’s household would include ginger, cinnamon, liquorice, vanilla (so. fancy), cardamom, hibiscus and so on.

In the wine camp, he’d also have access to verry and fruit wines—elderflower cordial being one example. But there’d be apple and berry wines. In the early middle ages, based on accounts from Arabic travellers, it appears that these were highly alcoholic and people were spinning after only a few cups and these are people with a phenomenally high alcohol tolerance.

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As mentioned in previous posts, I believe Grima likes his wine as a status symbol because bitch yeah, I made it. Look at my anachronistic pineapple decorating the table. However, outside of the wine I think he had a preference for herbed ales and meads infused with berries and other additives.

I always run his palate from sweet to tart. So he’d like Jamaica, if that version of hibiscus tea existed in Middle Earth. Sweet and sour, he’s into that flavour combination.

For herbal teas, I think he does a similar approach as he does for alcohol wherein he’ll drink ginger and cinnamon and cardamom once he’s in the king’s household as a status symbol. He can afford the fancy tisanes.

That said, as with alcohol, I think he does have a preference for the simpler teas he would have grown up with. Apple, nettle, rosehip, the various berry infusions/tisanes, and mint. He would be the person who adds a lot of honey to it, though.

Healer person: You know you should drink the dandelion tea straight with no additives, right?

Grima: I am going to put my body’s weight worth of honey into this cup and there is nothing you, or the gods, can do to stop me.

If we’re running with Grima doing some iteration of seidrcræft, there are some herbal teas that would be used to induce a trancelike state such as mugwort, henbane, mandrake, vervain and the like. Yeah, some of these are deadly, but in small doses are mild intoxicants/hallucinogens. Not to mention those Local Mushroom Teas.

One day I will write Grima doing more historic seidrcræft and not like Fantasy Seidrcræft and we will just get to see him being high as a kite while meditating and rocking back/forth to rhythmic chanting.

Does Rohan have drums? The Vikings didn’t. Tolkien doesn’t mention them having drums, only various wind instruments. Who knows.

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Rohan has breakfast—when Aragorn et al arrive at Meduseld there’s mention of Theoden’s meat having arrived at the board, but it’s morning, so presumably it’s breakfast. Not all societies do breakfast, so that’s a notable thing.

Early medieval Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians seemed to do three meals a day, with breakfast being light, and lunch/dinner being heavier. Not that people didn’t have light snacks here and there, they for sure did, but the three/four o’clock afternoon break for tea or coffee wasn’t a ritualized thing. I also have Rohan following that example.

All of that said, I envision Grima as a snacky person. He’s always nibbling on something at any given moment. He was that kid who could eat a cow and then some and still be hungry. Hollow leg, that sort of thing.

So, he’s sitting there in a council meeting or something and out of no where an apple materializes and people are like “where did you get that” and Grima just smiles and eats it and Eomer is like “Why do you think his robes are so big? They’re full of lies and also snacks.”

Eomer has ransacked Grima’s anachronistic office that Fandom, myself included, have given him for snacks. He knows where Grima keeps his secret stash of baked goods and other treats snaffled out of the kitchens.

Grima’s light fingers extend to procuring treats for himself as well as shiny objects.

And for sure Grima has a sweet tooth—which I think is an across-the-board fandom read on him? At least, those of us in the Grima Camp have that read, from what I’ve seen on tumblr and in the fic I’ve read.

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Does Grima have a ritual around at least one of the smaller meals that’s not a formal event? I suspect he does. He strikes me as someone who likes his rituals and habits and so on.

For me, I like to think it’s breakfast. This man is not a morning person. He drags his desiccated carcass out of bed, splashes water on his face, contemplates if he needs to shave or not, drops himself into his clothes and shuffles out into the main hall.

He then procures for himself some herbal tea of some kind with a half-tonne of honey dumped in. It has made Eomer nauseous watching Grima add honey to his tisanes. He just chucks a whole ass honeycomb in.

Eowyn: vile. that is disgusting

Eomer: Pretty sure the spoon can stand up in it.

Grima: I need the sugar. We don’t have caffeinated beverage in our country. You don’t know how much I am suffering, Eomer “I wake up at 4am for a light 10k and some push-ups” son of Eomund and Eowyn “I have more energy than the gods ever intended one person to have” daughter of Eomund.

Anyway.

After he gets his tea made to his liking he gets a bowl of some sort of yoguhrt/skyr adjacent product with some berries and disappears around the back of Meduseld to consume it in peace and allow himself to slowly wake up without the rucous of people like Eomer being bombastic and entirely too awake for the hour (it’s like 10am).

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For some sweet foods he could be snacking on, that I assume him to be partial to, here are a few examples (taken from a previous post):

Sweet & fried breads (e.g., gingerbread, apple loaf, proto-funnel cake etc.)

Fried, baked or stewed fruits, also candied nuts

Sweet cheeses

Custards

Tarts, pies, cakes, and cookies (a very wide range of these existed, include medieval cheesecake)

Sweet toasts i.e. toastee (most usually topped with spiced honey and available nuts)

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Some brief notes on day-to-day food

Obviously everything Grima eats is seasonal. And I’ve talked about it before, in other posts, but I have never envisioned him as being a picky eater (until Saruman & the Lotho Incident). He was raised in a subsistence-based society, that seems to be pretty much living harvest-to-harvest therefore diets of those who are not nobility are mostly limited to what they have access to locally. Which can be quite diverse! But it depends on the time year and where they are in the country.

Obviously the average Joe living in Edoras, the capital and a trade centre, will have a wider variety of food to choose from than a farmer in the countryside. But still, everyone is constrained by season as well as income.

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Bread would have been a huge thing, considering it’s a staple of their diet. I also see Grima just fucking loving carbs. He eats so many of them. They make him so happy.

Neil Price writes:

A whole doctoral thesis has been written on just on Viking bread, and it is in the details of daily life like this that the vividness of their world really emerges. From graves and settlement contexts all over central Sweden, but especially from the Birka burials, at least nine distinctive kinds of bread are known. There were rectangular loaves baked in a form; round loaves threaded on a thin wire; oval buns; thin, soft and foldable flatbreads made on a circular griddle pan—rather like a sort of Nordic tortilla stuffed with food; thin, circular wheels of dry, crisp flatbread with a central hole so they could be hung up for storage […]; at least two different kinds of biscuits; little balls of friend dough; and crunchy figure-of-eight shaped snacks that resemble pretzels or, more particularly, the Swedish nibbles still called kringlor. They made their bread with hulled barley and oats, sometimes wheat for the thinner forms, and very occasionally rye.

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As for meat Grima would eat mutton, goat, beef, pork, chicken, duck, geese, various other waterfowl and game birds, deer, boar, other game meat and forms of venison (Rohan doesn’t have elk, moose or reindeer, it seems, but they’d have deer and the like). He’d also eat freshwater fish, eels, snails, molluscs, plants (e.g., watercress), and other things of that sort.

Pre-Lotho Sackville-Baggins Possible Cannibalism: He’ll eat pretty much anything put in front of him. He has his favoured foods, but there’s no real show-stoppers for him.

Post-Lotho Sackville-Baggins Possible Cannibalism: he goes basically pescatarian + chicken unless he feels he must be polite and eat the meat put in front of him. He’s better with beef or goat but he absolutely can’t do pork.

The reason for the fish + chicken is that I firmly believe Middle Earth is composed predominantly of societies that don’t see chicken as real meat. So, if Grima is like “I don’t really do meat” everyone is like “that’s fine, we have chicken.”

Grima: I’ve gone off meat. After the Saruman Incident.

Eomer: Reasonable. Entirely reasonable. But that’s ok because we have fish and there’s also lots of chicken, gamebirds and waterfowl. So we’re all good! You can avoid meat very easily.

Luckily for Grima, he is born and raised in this society and so therefore would agree with them.

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I feel like vegetables and fruit are all pretty self-explanatory. Pretty much keep it pre-colonization of north, south, and central America and the Caribbean and you’re probably on the right track.

Grima would be eating lots of carrots, turnips, parsnips, beetroot, cabbages/lettuce/chard/other herbage, onions, garlic, certain beans, peas, other legumes etc.

For fruit the local options are likely various apples, pears, plums and other stone fruits, many different berries (gooseberry, blackberry, red currant, bilberries etc.). Theoden’s household could likely import more exotic options of oranges and other citrus, pomegranates, quinces, grapes, rhubarb, and the like.

Depending on the kind of orange that exists in middle earth, they may not have had the sweet varietal, only the bitter or sour orange.

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Holy shit, I have written way too much on this.

Thank you so much for the ask! My apologies for how fucking long it got.

[moon-mirage]

Here's my take on Effie Trinket and yes, I wanted her to look a bit off-putting. 😝

I added the rose theme towards the end on a whim - I'm not really good at drawing flowers, especially roses but it it fit the pink vibe so well. The lips are based on the movie make-up but instead of no eyebrows, I went with the highly arched, over-dramatic, thin eyebrows sported by 1930s Hollywood divas.

It was definitely fun to draw her because of the over-the-top fashion and hair. I'll probably draw her some more just because it's so much fun coming up with those outrageous styles. 😄

[schmweed]

Succession | S02E02

[shieldwife]

I need the hunger games to go back to no longer being relevant to most people because I keep getting genuinely heated over other people's opinions on a ya series and it's embarrassing

[bilolli]

I don't usually post my traditional sketches anymore but I recently was initiated to cult of the lamb by reading bamsara's fic and the two little guys are so similar to my old o.cs that I had to sketch something (role reversal/clothes swap whoop whoop).

Feel free to ignore, I feel funny today hehehiho

[jessamine-rose]

/obey me! vent/

[drawnecromancy]

You know what, I'm in a weird spot with that FNAF movie.

I don't think it was very good ! As a horror movie, it made me laugh because especially towards the end the mystery and atmosphere vanished to get Fazbear Franchise Points. Like. Not laugh in the way horror can make you startle-laugh, or laugh so self-soothe. In a way that is "oh god, I see what they wanted to do, and they failed, and this is so endearing, and also so funny".

But...

I enjoyed myself immensely. It had some really cool ideas, and i love love love the visuals. I'd recommend watching it, even.

I like despite how the writing feels flimsy, cardboardy at times, Mike felt real and is very consistent throughout the movie.

I like despite how that movie is trying to tell 4 different stories, not all of them horror, just weirdly breaking up narratively in ways that don't really make sense, it's trying to tell all of them with love and care for the characters.

I love how it's not a soulless cash grab adaptation, and how I can overlook the writing flaws and the one cameo and enjoy it because damn ! It's a whole movie about the giant murder robots ! Those giant murder robots I loved as a kid !

I, genuinely, think that writing wise, you could break it up in 2, maybe even 3 different movies that would all have enough substance to go for an hour and a half. Really, most of this movie's problem isn't the stories it's trying to tell. It's - pick your battles, that's too many battles, put some back.

But it was genuinely fun.

I wouldn't call it a "good movie", by my own standards, but I had 0 expectations and again I enjoyed myself immensely.

Go watch them giant robots. It's so cool. It's so cool.

[pohlepen]

frankie is so reckless and self destructive and destructive in general that you think she'd love motorcycles, but she actually hates them. despises them. would rather walk than ride on the back of one. but she saw too many injuries working in the emergency room and it's permanently stained her opinion. her 1% of self preservation kicks in as soon as she sees one.

[timeisacephalopod]

Part of being Canadian is how similar we are to the US, and honestly not a single person on earth I think could genuinely pin point the difference between Canadian and American culture but the average Canadian. Americans assume we're the same as them (we aren't), even a bunch of Canadians think we're Americans, especially around voting seasons, and about half our cultural identity is "we're Not American!" but there are some cultural differences and if we all spoke French equally we could have had a language distinction but nooooo. Despite not being America unfortunately such a fuck off massive country right below your teeny tiny ass country (population wise) does result in a cultural avalanche from said fuck off massive country. Especially when you share a language.

The war of 1812 will forever be funny to me though because Americans were like "hmm maybe Canadians would also like to tell the British to fuck off, we will invade to show them!" And Canada was like *burns down the white house* and we've been tentatively chill with each other ever since lmao (even when we probably like. Shouldn't be cool with America but like. We could not risk that implosion politically or otherwise it'd be suicide).

[quietwingsinthesky]

Benny: Thanks for not giving up on me, brother.

Dean: Don't give me a reason to.

(im going to throw up)

[beesinspades]

very happy to be a little over two months on T but boi despite no changes the hormonal mess it's causing has been taking me on a RIDE and next time is my first shot by myself i totally expect to either chicken out or suck it up and feel sick af afterwards

[albatris]

maybe i should post nat's first murder <3

[autumnhobbit]

not having a great day honestly

[were-all-just-stories]

guys help i just saw someone on tiktok claim katniss was toxic do people have zero reading comprehension or what

[sureuncertainty]

remember when I randomly hyperfixated on the hunger games for like 2 weeks back in January and then suddenly the hunger games had a huge renaissance like almost immediately afterwards? that was fucking wild

[unusualshrimp]

hey sorry i can't come to work today im thinking about the various implications of zombie horror and the way it affects people